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Final Fantasy IV, Redeemed

Having completed the PSP port of Final Fantasy 4 recently, I recant my earlier opinions of the game. I think those were colored too much by coming off of Final Fantasy 6, which made me expect much more from the narrative and gameplay than was reasonable. With the context of the NES FFs on my side, the decisions they made make a lot more sense and are more easily understood and accepted. In essence, it was an attempt at "bridging" the classic DnD inspired FFs with a new style of RPG - the cinematic RPG. This style would be fully realized later in FF6 and, most notably, FF7.

What pulled my enjoyment down was the game being extremely focused on telling a story early on, because said story was too cliched and hamfisted to make any real impact. That being said, I do have to give it credit for being well told, or rather more accurately, well staged, and it's not hard to see how the eventing would have exceptionally affected impressionable children back in 1992. When the game transitions into being more of a "real" RPG in its later parts, it retains enough of the charm of the earlier FFs in its gameplay to be endearing, despite some obvious flaws in its mechanics.

It also helps that the PSP version nails down the presentation amazingly, with both exceedingly pretty visuals and brilliantly rearranged music. The difference between it and the SNES version is like night and day, especially since the latter had some clearly NES era visuals with some really ugly coloring in place of abstractable spaces, which, oddly enough, made it look largely worse than the NES titles it followed up on, despite being on a stronger system. It's pretty clear that Squaresoft hadn't really figured out how to work with an SNES yet while developing this, and frankly the SNES version is basically not worth playing as anything except a historical artifact these days, as far as I'm concerned.

With all that said, I ultimately raise FF4 up to the level of a decent RPG. It's not exactly a flavor of RPG I like, and I have to admit I consider both its predecessor and successor to be superior personally, but with the proper context in place, and enough helping out on the presentation and engine front, it's still a pretty good time. It's an even better time if you actually enjoy the hamfisted drama, ironically or otherwise. I largely didn't, but that shouldn't by any means stop you, lol.

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